International News

Teach for America initiative

As 58,000 pupils of the district of Columbia Public Schools (DCPS) begin a new school year, their teachers are adjusting to a controversial new boss. Michelle Rhee, a rookie superintendent, is an unusual choice to run one of the worst school systems in America. She is the youngest chancellor ever of DC’s public schools and the first non-black to run the system in four decades. But the most interesting aspect of mayor Adrian Fenty’s choice is that Ms. Rhee is an alumna of a voluntary organisation called Teach for America.

Only about half of Americans growing up in poverty complete high school, and those who do, reach only class VIII. In an effort to solve that problem, Teach for America (TFA) recruits top college graduates — usually people without teaching qualifications or experience — and asks them to spend two years teaching some of the nation’s poorest children. "We need fundamental systemic change and we believe our people can help be a force for that," says Wendy Kopp, TFA’s founder and CEO.

A lot of people agree. Business Week honoured TFA as one of the best places to launch a career. Fast Company included it in a list of "Entrepreneurs who are changing the world". And the organisation is popular; it has grown from just a few hundred corps members in 1990 to more than 5,000 teachers in 26 regions today. It aims to nearly double in size by 2010, and has just announced plans to support similar programmes abroad.

The effectiveness of TFA teachers is hotly debated. Critics point to studies that say traditionally certified teachers perform better. Even some supporters worry that teachers don’t stay in classrooms much beyond the end of their two-year commitment. Randi Weingarten, the president of New York City’s United Federation of Teachers, wants more TFA teachers to stay after two years because of the large initial investment. But TFA supporters say, it has never promised its teachers will stay longer.

The TFA says the most reliable data on the comparative effectiveness of corps members comes from a study by Mathematica Policy Research in 2004. Uniquely, the study randomly assigned students within the same schools to teachers both from TFA and traditional certification programmes. It found that students taught by TFA teachers performed slightly better in maths and about the same in reading as those taught by non-TFA novice teachers. But Kopp acknowledges that even the better results shown by one study will not, by themselves, be enough to achieve TFA’s goal: an "excellent education", one day, for "all children in this nation".

It will be hard for even a corps of 10,000 teachers to have a large impact in a country that has 3 million teachers in public schools alone. But the influence on TFA’s alumni, supporters say, is at least as important as the direct impact in the classroom. Placing alumni in other sectors where they may pioneer changes, is a cornerstone of TFA’s strategy. Ms. Rhee, the DCPS chancellor, is just one example.

Whether or not they stay in the classroom, the vast majority of corps members are both enraged by the state of the public education system and confident they can help fix it. Ultimately, TFA isn’t meant to solve the teacher-quality crisis or end teacher shortages or even to create lifelong teachers. It hopes to improve the public education system by convincing young leaders to teach, even if briefly.

Andy Rotherham, a former Clinton administration official who now serves on the Virginia Board of Education, is confident TFA will ultimately succeed. "Public education in the United States is being deregulated, and that never happens without a fight. What it really boils down to is producer interest versus consumer interest. In the sweep of American history it may take a while, but the consumers ultimately win."

Formation of new Red man

Venezuelan parents can have any schooling they like for their children — so long as it’s red. That is the message from President Hugo Chavez and his elder brother Adan, a Marxist physics teacher who is this Latin American republic’s education minister. It is spelt out in a 549-page draft education plan recently leaked to the press. It was expressed, too, at the start of the school year in September when television showed images of high school pupils chanting "fatherland, socialism or death!" and singing songs in praise of the president.

For many teachers and middle-class parents this smacks of an Orwellian nightmare. Fears of government intervention in private schools brought them on to the streets in the early years of Chavez’s presidency, and helped provoke the coup that briefly ousted him from power in 2002. Back then, the government denied that it was seeking to indoctrinate youngsters. But both Chavez brothers now say that the aim of the new education plan is "formation of the new man".

That phrase was coined by Ernesto ‘Che’ Guevara in the early years of the Cuban revolution. His "new man" would be motivated by moral rather than material incentives. Cuba’s communist government has pursued this chimera in vain for decades. Now its Venezuelan ally is embarking on the quest. "The old values of individualism, capitalism and egoism must be demolished," says the president. "New values must be created, and that can only be done through education."

By their mid-teens pupils will need to show "a critical attitude toward any attempt at internal or external aggression". They will also have to develop "community-information mechanisms" (i.e say opponents, a network of spies) to defend national sovereignty. Officials admit that this is an ideological project, but so are all education curriculums, they argue.

Already, according to the education ministry, 150,000 teachers have taken part in courses to prepare them for the new ‘Bolivarian Education System’, recently defined by the president as "red, very red". Even those sympathetic to the idea remain confused, because they have yet to receive a copy of the revised curriculum. Nonetheless, the new approach is being gradually adopted by state schools, and will be applied to private ones next year. About a fifth of Venezuelan children are taught in private schools, and the government says that they will not be abolished. But the president has warned them that if they decline to implement the new curriculum, they will be taken over by the state.

McKinsey prescription for better learning outcomes

According to UK’s National Foundation for Education Research, there had been (until recently) no measurable improvement in the standard of literacy and numeracy in primary schools in first world industrial countries for 50 years.

England and Wales are not alone. Australia has almost tripled education spending per student since 1970. No improvement. American spending has almost doubled since 1980 and class sizes are the lowest ever. Again, nothing. No matter what you do, it seems standards refuse to budge. To misquote Woody Allen, those who can’t do, teach: those who can’t teach, run the schools.

But there are big variations in educational standards between countries. These have been measured and re-measured by the OECD’s Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) which has established, first that the best performing countries do much better than the worst and second, that the same countries head such league tables again and again: Canada, Finland, Japan, Singapore, South Korea.

Those findings raise what ought to be a fruitful question: what do the successful lot have in common? Yet the answer to that has proved surprisingly elusive. Not more money. Singapore spends less per student than most. Nor more study time. Finnish students begin school later, and study fewer hours than in other rich countries.

Now, an organisation from outside the teaching fold — McKinsey & Co, the New York-based consultancy that advises companies and governments — has boldly gone where educationalists have mostly never gone: into policy recommendations based on the PISA findings. Schools, it says, need to do three things: get the best teachers; get the best out of teachers; and step in when pupils start to lag behind. That may not sound exactly "first-of-its-kind": schools surely do all this already? Actually they don’t. If these ideas were really taken seriously they would change education radically.

Begin with hiring the best. There is no question that, as one South Korean official put it, "the quality of an education system cannot exceed the quality of its teachers." Studies in Tennessee and Dallas have shown that, if you take pupils of average ability and give them to teachers deemed in the top fifth of the profession, they end up in the top 10 percent of student performers; if you give them to teachers from the bottom fifth, they end up at the bottom. The quality of teachers affects student performance more than anything else.

Yet most school systems do not go all out to get the best. The New Commission on the Skills of the American Workforce, a non-profit organisation, says America typically recruits teachers from the bottom third of college graduates. Washington DC recently hired as chancellor for its public schools an alumna of an organisation called Teach for America, which seeks out top graduates and hires them to teach for two years. Both her appointment and the organisation caused a storm (see p.56).

McKinsey argues that the best performing education systems nevertheless manage to attract the best. In Finland all new teachers must have a Master’s degree. South Korea recruits primary school teachers from the top 5 percent of graduates, Singapore and Hong Kong from the top 30 percent.

They do this in a surprising way. You might think that schools should offer as much money as possible, seek to attract a large pool of applicants into teacher training and then pick the best. Not so, says McKinsey. If money were so important, then countries with the highest teacher salaries — Germany, Spain and Switzerland — would presumably be among the best. They aren’t. In practice, the top performers pay no more than average salaries.

Singapore screens candidates with a fine mesh before teacher training and accepts only the number for which there are places. Once in, candidates are employed by the education ministry and more or less guaranteed a job. Finland also limits the supply of teacher-training places to demand. In both countries teaching is a high-status profession (because it is fiercely competitive) and there are generous funds for each trainee teacher (because there are few of them).

South Korea shows how the two systems produce different results. Its primary school teachers have to pass a four-year undergraduate degree from one of only a dozen universities. Getting in requires top grades; places are rationed to match vacancies.

Lastly, there is a pattern in what countries do once pupils and schools start to fail. The top performers intervene early and often. Finland has more special education teachers devoted to laggards than anyone else — as many as one teacher in seven in some schools. In any given year, a third of pupils get one-on-one remedial lessons. Singapore provides extra classes for the bottom 20 percent of students and teachers are expected to stay behind — often for hours — after school to help students.

McKinsey’s conclusions seem more optimistic: getting good teachers depends on how you select and train them; teaching can become a career choice for top graduates without paying a fortune; and that with the right policies, schools and pupils are not doomed to lag behind.

THES World University Rankings

The world’s top ten universities are in the UK or the US, according to the annual Times Higher Education Supplement-QS World University Rankings published on November 9. Harvard has emerged as the world’s top university for the fourth time in succession, with Cambridge, Oxford and Yale universities all tied for second place.

The UK has four institutions in the top ten this year, compared with three last year. Imperial College, London makes fifth place, up from ninth last year and University College, London rose 16 places to be ranked ninth. Princeton, California Institute of Technology, Chicago and Massachusetts Institute of Technology make up the rest of the top ten.

The rankings also confirm London’s standing as a global academic centre. King’s College, London rose 22 places to 24. The London School of Economics (LSE) is the most prominent university to have dropped in the rankings, down 42 places to 59th position. LSE’s fall is mainly due to changes in the methodology used by QS, The Times Higher’s partner in the rankings. The method has reduced the disproportionate effect of the LSE’s high percentage of international staff and students. This is explained more fully in the rankings supplement. The rankings are based on the opinion of 7,000 active academics and graduate recruiters, alongside quantitative data on research impact, staff and student numbers, and universities’ levels of internationalisation.

The rankings confirm the modest global status of universities in continental Europe, with the top university being France’s Ecole Normale Superieure in 26th place. This places continental Europe behind institutions in Canada, Australia, Japan, Hong Kong, the US and UK. The top 200 includes four from the developing world: two in Brazil, one from Mexico and for the first time an African university, Cape Town, in 200th place. Significantly, none of India’s 350 universities and 18,000 colleges are included in the global 200 ranking. But several Asian universities have risen markedly in the table including Hong Kong University, up 15 places to 18th rank.

Sarkozy runs into teachers blockade

Thousands of teachers in France recently ignored an order from President Nicolas Sarkozy to honour a 17-year-old communist member of the Resistance who was shot by the Nazis 66 years ago.

On May 16, the day of his inauguration, Sarkozy’s first presidential announcement declared his wish that the farewell letter written by schoolboy Guy Moquet to his family before his execution on October 22, 1941 should be read to "all lycee (upper secondary) students in France" in honour of patriotism and the Resistance. In his letter to his parents and youngest brother, Moquet wrote of his imminent death, called on his family to be brave, and expressed hope that his death would "serve for something".

On October 22, most lycees duly observed the event, many inviting former members of the Resistance, war veterans and MPs to attend. Prime minister Francois Fillon invited pupils from three Parisian lycees to his office where he told them: "Like many others, (Moquet) was shot for love of France and its ideals."

But many teachers and historians as well as opposition politicians protested against the commemoration which they denounced as exploiting history for political ends. Teachers unions condemned the "manipulation of history" and "intolerable interference", complaining the president had no right to meddle in the education system. Snes, the biggest union representing secondary teachers, called on its members to boycott the event.

Teachers contributing to an interactive article on the website of Le Monde explained why they would not read the letter to their pupils. Their reasons included: "confusion of memory with history"; use of emotion instead of reason; usurping of history — "Moquet was not arrested because he was a resistant against the German occupation, but because he was a communist"; that Moquet’s anti-capitalist tracts should be read out instead; that it was inopportune at a time when Europe was discussing a new treaty to revive events of 66 years ago.

Sarkozy had planned to mark the anniversary on October 22 at the lycee Carnot in Paris, where Moquet had been a pupil. However, the president called off his visit after a number of the school’s teachers and students made known their opposition to the exercise.

Early winds of curricular change

"Classes struggle, some classes triumph, others are eliminated." Such, wrote Mao Zedong, is history. Such, too was history teaching. In the 1970s it was not uncommon for a teacher to begin a lesson by telling students to take a ruler, turn to a page of their textbook, lay the ruler along the side of the page… and tear it out. Now again, in many parts of China, textbooks are being rewritten. But this time the aim is to make them livelier and less dogmatic. But some changes are raising hackles.

In September last year, the introduction of a new history textbook in Shanghai’s senior secondary schools caused a storm because of its cursory treatment of Mao himself (Bill Gates and J.P. Morgan were better served). It also failed to dwell — as Chinese history textbooks ritually do — on the sufferings of pre-communist Chinese at the hands of foreign imperialists. A group of history scholars in Beijing reportedly sent a letter to the government saying the book contained serious errors in its political orientation.

The Chinese press has now dubbed the book one of the shortest lived in the history of Chinese textbooks. In May education officials in Shanghai decided to withdraw it. Since September a new book hewing closer to the old style has replaced it.

The controversy, however, has not abated. Some of China’s feistier journals, despite being state-owned, have criticised Shanghai’s decision. China Newsweek, a magazine controlled by China’s second-largest news agency, called it "rash". It said the public as well as scholars should be more tolerant of teaching materials that deviated from set opinions. A weekend newspaper, Southern Metropolis Weekly,quoted a scholar as saying that Chinese children had been fed a "superficial" and "problematic" view of history and this "laughable" approach had to change.

Changes in the Chinese language curriculum have caused a stir too. In many Beijing schools this year, ‘The story of Ah Q’, a gloomy allegorical novella written by Lu Xun in 1921 and beloved of China’s communists for its damning insights into the "feudal" thinking of the time, has been dropped. New to the set texts is a martial-arts novel by Hong Kong writer, Louis Cha. At least school children will be happy.

Unmasking of art history professor

South Korea’s obsession with academic pedigree has exposed its higher education system to levels of forgery, fraud and exploitation rare in other developed countries.

Graduating from the right university, very often a foreign institution can be the ticket to a successful and comfortable life. As a result, the pressures on South Korean teenagers are immense. Hundreds commit suicide every year because of fear of failing the exams needed to enter higher education. Thousands of others uproot themselves in pursuit of foreign degrees, which are generally perceived to be more prestigious than those awarded domestically.

Recently an enthralled public witnessed a scandal arising from one such monumental rule-bending, namely, the unmasking of a professor of art history as a fraud. Shin Jeong-ah, who rose rapidly from gallery assistant to professor at Seoul’s elite Dongguk University, was found to have invented her degrees, including a doctorate from Yale University and two lower degrees from the University of Kansas. She also claimed as her own work a plagiarised Ph D thesis.

Unfortunately for Ms. Shin, she rose too quickly in the eyes of some colleagues, and a whisper campaign prompted her employers to check her academic credentials more closely. They were all false. Ms. Shin had barely completed her high school studies.

Kim Kyung, a Seoul-based author and cultural commentator, observes: "I call our country the Republic of Forgery after Hwang Woo-Suk (caught falsifying research on cloning last year) and all the funny, fake luxury watches you see. To be honest, I feel sad and even stifled to live in a society where obsession with academic pedigree easily drives one to crime."

But the disgraced Prof. Shin is not alone in taking such risks. There are more than 60,000 full-time professors in South Korea and according to the Korea Research Foundation, about one in 30 has dubious qualifications. The demand for academic qualifications, particularly from elite universities, is so great in South Korean life that those without a respected qualification can find themselves regarded as second class citizens. Profitable businesses have been built on supplying carefully crafted fraudulent documents to those keen to get on. Only periodically are their deceptions uncovered.

In the fallout from the Shin exposure, actors, officials and now even a famous teaching monk have been implicated in claims of fraud. Observers say that employers have moved to carefully scrutinise employees’ CVs and verify the authenticity of the academic qualifications they list.

(Excerpted and adapted from Times Educational Supplement, Times Higher Education Supplement and The Economist)